GeoMesa and “The Farm Fantastic”
One of the most interesting areas where we’ve seen usage of GA-CCRi’s open source spatio-temporal database GeoMesa has been in precision agriculture. Recently we’ve been working with Farmer’s Edge, a company that provides nutrient management planning and agronomic service for millions of acres in multiple countries, because that kind of large-scale precision agriculture means large-scale spatial data.
An article titled The Farm Fantastic in a recent issue of Farm Life magazine describes the use of robot swarms, new kinds of sensors, and advanced analytics to help farmers raise healthy crops as efficiently as possible. (The same issue includes articles such as “Inside a Modern Cranberry Farm” and a guide to seasonal maintenance of gravel lanes.) The “Farm Fantastic” article features a description of how Farmer’s Edge is using a range of sensors to achieve these goals. Storing such geospatial data requires massive storage capability, especially when there is a temporal component, and Farmer’s Edge is using GeoMesa to store that data. The article quotes GA-CCRi’s Jim Hughes describing how the combination of these technologies can read streaming data from moving sensors to “quickly calculate the amount of fertilizer spread or size of harvest in a field, for example.”
Take a look at the article (click the “READ MORE” button near the bottom if you don’t see the discussion of the work being done by Farmer’s Edge with Jim) for a great example of how GeoMesa is bringing big spatial data management and analytics to the agricultural industry.